Man leaves cave, enters digital age....

Command Central before the PC... No offense to the Roland VS880 (pictured to the right of the mixer), I just don't have enough time on it to get good results.....


Getting a band demo is a tedious project, often with many pitfalls and the end result is usual only mildly gratifying.... Most of the time you wind up using an older peice of equipment that is borrowed from a freind, and no matter how savvy you are, you can't get the best results from the unit, so you deal with 'so-so'. Such was the case for the Nasty Habits demo, we had tracks done, they were O.K., we were waiting to get the final touches down, but weren't superly happy with the results. Just recently we decided to restart the demo ( a thought that usually ends up meaning a lot more time, more headaches....) Corey, the drummer, brought over a computer that he had built specifically for recording, using a prgram called Saw Studio. Being an anolog guy , it was tough to look at the computer and take it seriously (especially since the demo version of Saw that I downloaded from the company's site didn't even work), but I figured we'd give it a go... For some history, the only experience that I have had with completely digital recording was a studio project that turned out sounding worse than most of the previously mentioned demos ever did, and it was at a 'professional' studio... Now onto the good stuff... Corey was showing me the ropes, because I sit at 'Command Central' in our rehearsal room, and man did it seem easy! The interface on the screen is set up to look just like a tape machine, but it's all on the computer. We hooked up the signal converter that takes a regular line signal and makes it digital, we patched in a few goodies that we have available and BAM!!! We tracked the drums (thank God for Roland V-drums!!), bass and two guitar tracks live, the result was much better than usual, and it was noticable upon playback, with no extra mixing, so the finished product is going to be superb!!! ( the first version of the demo we played the original CD of the song, laid down the drum part to the CD, then added the other parts seperately, it sounded dead, no energy.... This new demo has more energy than I have ever heard on a demo, and it's not just us playing the songs too fast...) We have to lay down the keyboard tracks and the vocals this week, then it will be time to mix and master, I can't wait!! I've never been so eager to work on a demo before!! I can't wait until we can upload the demo to our website, and I can load it onto my MP3 player and jam out!!! I just can't believe how good it sounds already! We haven't applied any processing to the tracks yet, so we have no other direction to go than up with this demo.

I am a believer, it can be done, great sounding recordings can be done on a computer, there, I said it... I'm not going to throw all my tape players away just yet, but I have certainly seen the light as far as digital recording goes!!